This new version of the Forumware is a HUGE upgrade. And pretty much mandatory. Official support for the old version we were running ended on 4/1/17, so we literally had no choice but to upgrade in order to keep getting security enhancements, or even basic problems and questions dealt with. So when it comes to whining about hating the change, you need to just HTFU and recognize this had to happen to keep the site functional and secure. There was is no going back, and we had to move forward.

That being said, the software has changed a LOT of how we used to do things on SA. Some features seem to have disappeared (e.g. "User Name History") and many custom settings and tweaks we made were either over ridden or reset to the "Default" option for the board. The Moderation team is still learning the ins and outs of the software. Unfortunately, due to the critical rush to get the upgrade done it wasn't possible to take a leisure time running a staging site where I could learn all this new stuff and set it back to what we're used to. So we're going to have to sort it, find it, and fix it. And we might like some of the new stuff.

To wit, I've started this thread explicitly to get your comments, thoughts, bug reports, odd features, and "it didn't used to do THAT" observations all in one place.

Please don't whine, bitch and moan about how you hate the new board in this thread. A lot of you don't like change, I get that...I listened to all the pissing and moaning last time we did a major upgrade.

But what I DO want is all the weird shit you've noticed that no longer works the same way, doesn't work the way you've like it, etc.

I'll start with a couple of things I've noticed:

"New Content" no longer excludes PA. You will have to deal with this for a while. This is a specific tweak that Dave T. did back in the day, and I don't know how he did it. It was done once, it can be repeated, but I need to track down the snippet of code that got over written.

Certain default notifications that didn't exist before are on, and enabled by default. Eg. "When someone quotes me", "When someone mentions me", etc. You can turn them off in your own profiles, so I'm not going to disable the defaults for now. I may later, depending on user feedback if it's bugging the crap out of everyone.

For a brief moment you could edit your account labels...that used to be disabled, I re-disabled it.

It seems you need to go back to your original login name to log in, it's not clear what has happened to Display Names that were defined at the time of the upgrade.

The "Display Name History" feature seems to have gone away. I dislike this, and want to figure out how to bring it back.

You always had a one Name Change/30 days rule, though some of you are discovering it for the first time this week...

So, here is what I want from you guys in this thread...IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.

If there is some feature that is missing, or is weird, or is new and irritating...post it here.

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Previous mobile version took you to the first new post when you clickes on the thread title. Now you need to specifically hit the round or star icon next to the thread. Not a big deal but would be nice ro have back.

The announcement at the top of the page takes up an entire screen at the top of every page. I realise it's required but maybe only on the main forum page?

Previously you could click the 'next' button at the end of a thread and it would take you back to the top of the page. This no longer works. Would be nice to have back.

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This is a pretty big change, if you were one of those that used the "View Code" button.

BB Code is an older markup language that harkens back to the days before WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) visual editors. It allowed you to mark your plain text code up with square bracket [ ] tags in a standardized format to stick in links, bold, italics, quotes, font changes, and whatever else you could make it do.

In the old version of the Forums, when you hit the "View Source" button on the upper left, it took you to the BB Code mockup of what the post would look like.

It appears the decision was made that since BB Code is essentially an old, legacy tool that is no longer needed with a visual editor, that they could get away from direct support of it. So from how I'm seeing it and testing it, you CAN drop BBCode into your posts. But if you edit them again it won't be there, it will just be formatted again in the Editor, and no BB Code will show.

If you click the Source button now, what you get now is actual HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which is the raw stuff of web pages. In theory, it's better because you can really do a lot more with it...assuming you know HTML. Most of you do not, however, so it will do you less good to fiddle with it.

But the takeaway...

If you like formatting your posts with [ ] BB Code tags, you still can. It WILL work for the most part

If you later Edit a post you put BB Code into, the BB Code will likely not be there.

Oh yeah, remember to close your tags. That means use the [/ ] close tag for whatever you've BB Coded.

If you don't things get ugly fast.

Unfortunately I can't easily and explicitly type out examples, because the second I type in some BB Code, it gets interpreted into the post and disappears.

If you didn't use this feature, don't worry about it.

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I like the blue line indicating limit of previously read posts in a thread.

I would really like to see the "first unread post" and "most recent post" preview button back in threads - gives us the option of marking a thread read without having to go to it and without being blind about the content we are skipping.

No doubt there are other features I haven't figured out yet, but I do tend to learn the minimum function of a programme and then move on to other things....

Hmmm...it seems that quotes are NOT nesting. This should have Merrill Levi's quote inside it.

I'm thinking there is a switch out there somewhere I've got to throw to turn it back on.

Yep, I was going to post that nested quotes are not working, but you found it already. You can seemingly quote the immediate text of the previous poster, but not the rest of the history of the post that person was quoting. That will be a Bigly change if there isn't a way to turn that back on.

I think you can click the star (or the dot, if you haven't posted in it) to the left of the thread title in the main forum list to get to the first unread.

Correct. That works the way it always did AFAICT. I think clicking on the thread title always took you to the first post even if you had previously been in there before. So clicking the star or the dot was the only way to go to last unread post IME.

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Nested quotes are an abomination that creates unreadable textwalls. If I've lost the plot, I'm happy to scroll back up. Attempting to edit out the extra crap often breaks the quote which is even worse. Just wanted to get my vote in there.

Can you enable users to select how many posts per page are displayed? The old setting is way too many posts/page. If you are coming in to a thread that has a lot of posts already, the only way to be sure you see it all is to read an entire page at once. Currently that can take a large chunk of time. 30/page seems like a reasonable setting. Fewer posts/page setting probably hammers the server more, if that is a concern, but generates more ad views too.

In the spirit of anarchy, any chance of letting users add tags to threads they didn't create? I promise not to make too many jokes in the tags.

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This is a pretty big change, if you were one of those that used the "View Code" button.

BB Code is an older markup language that harkens back to the days before WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) visual editors. It allowed you to mark your plain text code up with square bracket [ ] tags in a standardized format to stick in links, bold, italics, quotes, font changes, and whatever else you could make it do.

In the old version of the Forums, when you hit the "View Source" button on the upper left, it took you to the BB Code mockup of what the post would look like.

It appears the decision was made that since BB Code is essentially an old, legacy tool that is no longer needed with a visual editor, that they could get away from direct support of it. So from how I'm seeing it and testing it, you CAN drop BBCode into your posts. But if you edit them again it won't be there, it will just be formatted again in the Editor, and no BB Code will show.

If you click the Source button now, what you get now is actual HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which is the raw stuff of web pages. In theory, it's better because you can really do a lot more with it...assuming you know HTML. Most of you do not, however, so it will do you less good to fiddle with it.

But the takeaway...

If you like formatting your posts with [ ] BB Code tags, you still can. It WILL work for the most part

If you later Edit a post you put BB Code into, the BB Code will likely not be there.

Oh yeah, remember to close your tags. That means use the [/ ] close tag for whatever you've BB Coded.

If you don't things get ugly fast.

Unfortunately I can't easily and explicitly type out examples, because the second I type in some BB Code, it gets interpreted into the post and disappears.

If you didn't use this feature, don't worry about it.

Where is the "Source" button? I would really miss that ability to edit raw text (bbcode or HTML). Makes cleaning up quote tags and creating "complex" posts easier.

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Nested quotes were a pain in the ass here. Especially on a smartphone. Maybe a limit of 3 or 4 and then the early posts get dropped. I recall scrolling 50+ swipes to get to the unread portion of a single post.

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Now for the real Money Shot, at least as far as I'm concerned. The upgraded BBS and it's Spam checking capabilities shitcanned 22 spammers in the last 24 hours without my being bothered one bit by it. Didn't have to do a thing, they just got boxed out and blocked.

Nested quotes were a pain in the ass here. Especially on a smartphone. Maybe a limit of 3 or 4 and then the early posts get dropped. I recall scrolling 50+ swipes to get to the unread portion of a single post.

I was as grumpy as Jeffy In an airport full of slow fat smokers

HA! Now THAT is grumpy!

I'm staring to agree with the nested quotes. Works fine in a full laptop, but a HUGE PITA on a smartphone! Maybe we could have a max of two nested quotes rather than just one? Sometimes without that context of the one post before, a reply often makes no sense.

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Is there gonna be a more official/intricate 'desk top' version for when you're using you're phone? 'Cuz right now on my EyeFone it looks about as sophisticated and detailed as the very first internet porn site ever made......

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How long? i saw stuff from Korea that lasted over 2 hours, it would have been a pain & almost taken that long manually, if different accounts.

They never got in here.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, we had a module that I had Scot install that searched a known database of reported spammers based on username, e-mail, and IP addresses reported from various forums. That broke, and we couldn't make it work with our old, unsupported software version.

The new version has that functionality built it. So anyone trying to register with any information like that that matches a known spammer database will be blocked at registration and not allowed to create accounts.

By the time the spam shows up here as a post, it's too late - they're in and have a login. A moderator (usually Zapata or me) has to go and flag them as a Spammer, which bans them and nukes all their content.

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Is there gonna be a more official/intricate 'desk top' version for when you're using you're phone? 'Cuz right now on my EyeFone it looks about as sophisticated and detailed as the very first internet porn site ever made......

Well, at least you'll be used to using it one handed then.

What's there is what's there, there are supposed to be improvements. I don't have one of those Apple phones, so I can't tell how awful it looks. It looks OK on my Android.

I'm staring to agree with the nested quotes. Works fine in a full laptop, but a HUGE PITA on a smartphone! Maybe we could have a max of two nested quotes rather than just one? Sometimes without that context of the one post before, a reply often makes no sense.

Right now nesting any quotes is somewhat problematic. I'm having difficulty finding ANY references to it in IBP v4. It might be gone.

So the 20+ posts that did get in still had to be manually cleansed? Looked like 1 baddie posting repeditive muck.

Yes, once they are posting it's a manual cleanup.

The good news is we can flag a user as a spammer, and it cleans up all their threads and posts in one pass. So it's only a couple of mouse clicks if it's only one person churning out 30 spams.

There are some things we COULD do with user management to also throttle that back.

Right now, as soon as you clear Validation you become a "Member", with full posting privileges. To fight spam, we could put new accounts into a Newbie group, with flood control on the posts (as in you have to wait XX seconds between posts) or even restricting creation of topics until you've cleared certain benchmarks, like made Y number of posts on other topics. We could autopromote them to Member after a certain amount of time or # of posts. We've chosen not to do that, because it's unwelcoming to noobs.

But it would hamper spammers that still cleared the database lookups.

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Just a question: have older posts been purged? I'm certain my post count was over 4,000, but now it's under 3900. Not that it matters, but just curious. Maybe some of my embarrassing first posts are now gone...

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Just a question: have older posts been purged? I'm certain my post count was over 4,000, but now it's under 3900. Not that it matters, but just curious. Maybe some of my embarrassing first posts are now gone...

According to the Admin center, there are a bunch of jobs scheduled to be run. One of them is recalculating user post counts and thread statistics. I am assuming that archived posts will count in that. But it is certainly possible that some posts were removed years ago to make room or increase performance. An older version of the board started getting troublesome when things got too full.

There's also a bunch of indexing being done, which should make some things faster.

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I just posted a reply somewhere in a thread, and I inserted a link to a site using copy/paste, the good thing was that the software immediately recognised it as an url, but the not so good thing (comes to me as a bit of a bug) is that when you next start to type it gets to be part of the url... if that's not clear as an explanation, just try it, you'll see.

the other thing, as shown here, a linefeed seems to be an alinea feed, look at the distance between this line and previous one....had same problem on thunderbird mail a while ago , was a setting

The only major complaint/observation I have is that even with the patient advice from fellow forumites, posting direct links is still a 1/10 situation.

I highlight the Youtube URL, I hit the direct link icon. I get a hyper link instead of an embed. I try to post a picture, I get a hyperlink to my photophucket....... usually...... Sometimes it embeds. And this is the only forum where I have this problem, so I don't think it's all me.

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I went to Account Settings and chose "Do not send me notifications," but I'm still getting email notifications when someone posts in a thread that I also posted in, even though I haven't posted in either thread for quite a long time. It's not consistent, and it seems limited to just a couple of threads in GA.

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I went to Account Settings and chose "Do not send me notifications," but I'm still getting email notifications when someone posts in a thread that I also posted in, even though I haven't posted in either thread for quite a long time. It's not consistent, and it seems limited to just a couple of threads in GA.

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I went to Account Settings and chose "Do not send me notifications," but I'm still getting email notifications when someone posts in a thread that I also posted in, even though I haven't posted in either thread for quite a long time. It's not consistent, and it seems limited to just a couple of threads in GA.

It may be that you are subscribed to the threads, with notifications on.

Check under your account Settings, "Manage Followed Content", to see if you have any active subscriptions.